At 8:15am on the morning of August 6 2015, in blistering heat I stood with young and old at ground zero in Hiroshima, Japan. It was a bewildering, searing moment of collective remembrance, melting in the buzz of cicadas and hum of birdsong. I photographed the sky because it was clear, blue and beautiful, as it apparently was that morning in 1945 when the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ was dropped from a United States military plane. Three days later, on August 9, ‘Fat Man’ fell on Nagasaki.

The conservation work discussed in this blog was carried out for the Transforming IWM London Project (TIWML) – the installation of new Second World War and Holocaust Galleries opening in 2021, along with new learning spaces.

Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers went to the folk-dancing department; Mr Pauling went to woodcuts and weaving; Mr Digby-Smith was given the Arctic circle; Mr Bentley himself, after a dizzy period in which, for a day, he directed a film about postmen, for another day filed press-cuttings from Istanbul, and for the rest of the week supervised the staff catering, found himself at length back beside his busts in charge of the men of letters.

On 4 November 1943, just over a month after the first Allied troops entered war-torn Naples, Lt. Peter Francis of the Royal Artillery made his first acquaintance with the ruins of the Real Teatro di San Carlo, one of the oldest and most prestigious opera houses in the world. The theatre had been closed in 1942 and it was now in a terrible state: bomb damage had blasted the foyer, debris and layers of dust covered the internal surfaces, there was no electricity or water and a German machine gun nest was still installed on its roof.

In works on French history, the word ‘Occupation’ (often capitalised) is heavily associated with the Occupation of the Second World War, France’s ‘Dark Years’ of 1940–44. However, whilst this was and remains the defining experience of military occupation for the French, there were other instances of this phenomenon in the country’s modern history.

In October of last year, staff and students at IWM heard the sad news that the historian and writer Ben Shephard had died. His contributions ranged over a number of subjects but perhaps the most groundbreaking was his study of soldiers and psychiatrists, A War of Nerves (2000).

North Head Quarantine Station has been a place of quarantine for those wishing to enter Australia since the 1830s. Situated on a headland to the North East of Sydney Harbour, it is ideally sited to monitor maritime and naval traffic.

In 1917 George Elliott Dodds, a writer and editor at the Department of Information, suggested publishing a series of photographically illustrated booklets showing various war activities on the Home Front. After three years of war, the potential propaganda value of such publications for combating war weariness and maintaining domestic morale was recognised.

Much has been published about the ‘Myth of the Blitz’ in London, and how the official representation of how Londoners ‘carried on’ was often at odds with the truth of nightly looting from bombed houses, crimes committed during the blackout, homelessness and the mass burials of bomb victims.

On 24 June, the National Army Museum held a conference entitled ‘Women and the Army: One Hundred Years of Progress?’ to commemorate the centenary of women’s entry into the armed forces. The conference brought together researchers as well as current servicewomen, with papers discussing women’s experiences in the military from 1917 to the present day.

This photograph of an Indian soldier on board a troop ship to Singapore in 1941 confronts us with a familiar gesture from the Imperial War Museums archives. The soldier thrusts his head and arm through the ship’s porthole, and appropriates Churchill’s well-recognised ‘V for Victory’ symbol with the fore and middle fingers of his right hand. Incidentally, he isn’t attempting to be rude!